Chapter 80: The First Recruit
The warehouse was quiet.
It was the heavy, awkward quiet that comes after a near-death experience, a political tribunal, and the terrifying revelation that your leader might occasionally be possessed by the ghost of a god-dragon.
Just a typical Tuesday for Thanatos.
Michael sat on a stack of scavenged metal plates, watching Jax try to teach one of his googly-eyed drones how to play fetch with a deactivated grenade.
The drone, with a sad little whir, kept dropping it.
"No, no, Sparky," Jax said, his voice full of a patient, fatherly disappointment. "You have to *want* the grenade. You have to feel the grenade’s inner desire to be thrown."
It had been a week since the meeting with the Guild Council.
A week of tense silence and unspoken questions.
He and Chloe hadn’t spoken about what happened in that room. Not really.
She had just... intensified his training, her usual clinical focus now tinged with a new, sharp urgency.
It was her way of saying, "I am terrified of what is inside you, and we are going to logic it into submission."
He appreciated the effort.
Jinx strolled into the main common area, a datapad in her hand and a look of profound annoyance on her face.
"Okay, Boss Lady," she said, her voice echoing in the vast, half-finished space. "Your new security protocols are up and running."
She tossed the datapad onto the holographic table where Chloe was working.
"We now have a perimeter defense system so paranoid it will probably classify a moderately aggressive pigeon as a Class-C threat."
Chloe didn’t look up from her own screen.
"Pigeons can be utilized as effective, low-cost carriers for micro-surveillance devices," she stated flatly. "Paranoia is a logical response to a data-driven threat assessment."
"Right," Jinx drawled. "I’ll be sure to tell that to the next pigeon I see trying to steal my lunch."
She turned to Michael. "You. Spooky. How’s the head? Still got a god co-pilot, or did he get off at the last stop?"
"He’s quiet," Michael said, which was mostly true.
The dragon’s echo was a low, constant hum in the back of his soul now, a quiet, patient weight. It wasn’t screaming anymore.
It was just... waiting.
"Good," Jinx grunted. "Keep it that way."
Chloe finally looked up, her face a mask of pure, analytical focus.
"The events at the council meeting have highlighted a significant operational deficiency," she announced, her voice cutting through their easy banter.
"We are reactive," she stated. "We respond to threats as they appear. The DGC moves, we counter. The Vanguard sets a trap, we are forced to react to its parameters."
She pulled up a new file on the holographic display.
"This is not a sustainable model for long-term survival," she continued. "We are blind. We need eyes."
Jax, having given up on Sparky, hobbled over on his new, high-tech crutch. "Ooh, are we getting a super-spy satellite? I call dibs on naming it!"
"Negative," Chloe said. "We need something more precise. We need a pre-cognitive asset."
She pulled up a grainy, black-and-white photograph. It was a security camera still of a young woman, maybe a year or two younger than Michael, with wide, terrified eyes and a cascade of dark, messy hair.
"This is Luna," Chloe began. "She is a latent-class Awakened. A Rift-Seer."
Jinx let out a short, humorless laugh. "A seer? You mean a fortune teller? Boss Lady, you’ve been spending too much time in the Undercroft. That stuff is ninety-nine percent snake oil and one percent bad synth-ale."
"Her abilities are not mystical," Chloe corrected, her eye twitching almost imperceptibly at the interruption. "They are quantifiable. A Rift-Seer possesses a unique form of psychic sensitivity. They can feel the subtle energy fluctuations, the stress-fractures in reality, that precede a Gate manifestation."
"She doesn’t see the future," Chloe finished. "She feels the present so acutely that it looks like the future to everyone else."
"She can give us warnings," Michael said, the strategic value clicking into place. "Hours, maybe even days, before a Gate opens."
"Precisely," Chloe confirmed. "She would be an invaluable early-warning system."
"So, what’s the catch?" Jinx asked, her arms crossed, her cynical defenses fully engaged. "If she’s so valuable, why isn’t she already working for some big-shot Guild?"
Chloe’s expression turned grim.
"Because her awakening was... traumatic," she said, pulling up a redacted DGC incident report. "She was caught in the middle of a rogue Gate collapse in a residential district. Her powers manifested uncontrollably. The DGC classified her as the cause of the event, not a victim of it."
"She’s been on the run ever since," Chloe finished. "Suppressing her powers. Hiding in plain sight."
"So she’s one of us," Jax said, his usual manic energy softening into something a little more serious. "A stray."
"Where is she?" Michael asked.
Chloe pulled up a new image. A quiet, dusty, and deeply uninteresting-looking bookstore in the East Village.
"She’s hiding where no one would ever think to look for a high-level psychic asset," Chloe said. "She’s working as a clerk."
The bookstore smelled of old paper, dust, and the quiet, gentle sadness of forgotten stories.
Luna was behind the counter, a thin, nervous-looking girl who seemed to be trying to make herself as small as possible. She jumped when the bell over the door chimed.
Chloe, ever the tactician, went in first.
Her approach was a masterpiece of cold, logical, and utterly terrifying recruitment.
"Luna," she began, her voice crisp and clinical. "My name is Chloe. I have analyzed your current life situation. Your employment provides a suboptimal income-to-risk ratio. Your current unregistered status places you at a ninety-three percent probability of eventual capture and indefinite detention by the DGC."
Luna just stared at her, her eyes wide with a pure, primal terror.
"I am presenting you with a statistically superior alternative," Chloe continued, completely oblivious. "Join my organization. We can provide security, resources, and a structured environment in which you can safely quantify and control your abilities."
Luna looked like she was about to faint.
Okay, Michael’s inner monologue drawled. The scary robot lady is trying to recruit someone by reading them the terms and conditions.
This is going well.
He decided it was time to intervene.
He stepped forward, trying to give her a reassuring smile.
"Hi," he said. "Sorry about her. She’s... efficient."
The moment he stepped into her line of sight, Luna recoiled as if she’d been physically struck.
She let out a small, terrified gasp, her hands flying to her head.
She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the air around him.
He could feel it with his own [Void Sense]. His energy signature, his corruption, it was a physical presence in the room. A suffocating cloud of dark, hungry power.
To a Seer, it must have been like staring into the sun.
A sun made of nightmares.
"So much... noise," she whispered, her voice trembling. "The whispers... the hunger... the dragon..."
She stumbled back, knocking over a stack of books, her eyes fixed on him with a look of pure, unadulterated horror.
He wasn’t a boy to her.
He was a monster wearing a boy’s skin.
Well, this is also going well, his inner monologue added wearily.
Jinx, who had been watching the entire train wreck from the doorway, let out a long, put-upon sigh.
"Alright, you two geniuses, out," she growled, shoving both Michael and Chloe towards the door. "You’re scaring the stray."
She turned to Luna, her own expression softening, the hard, cynical edges sanded away for a moment.
"Hey," she said, her voice surprisingly gentle. "I get it. The world’s a scary place when you’ve got something inside you that no one understands."
She gestured vaguely towards the door. "Those two are a mess. One’s a walking calculator, and the other one’s got more ghosts in his head than a haunted house."
"But they’re good people," she said, the words feeling strange and unfamiliar on her tongue. "They’re trying to do something right in a world that’s gone all kinds of wrong."
Jax hobbled in, a cheerful, disarming grin on his face.
"What she’s trying to say is, we’re a bunch of broken toys," he said, leaning on his crutch. "But we’re a set."
He looked at Luna, his eyes full of a genuine, chaotic warmth.
"Look, kid," he said. "Being alone out here sucks. Trust me, I know. But being part of a team, even a really weird, really dysfunctional team... it’s better."
"Plus," he added, his grin widening. "We have pizza."
Luna looked from Jax’s ridiculous, hopeful face to Jinx’s grim, but honest, one.
She looked at the door, where she could still feel the terrifying, overwhelming presence of the boy with the dragon in his soul.
She was terrified.
But for the first time in a long time, she felt something else.
A flicker of hope.
She took a slow, shaky breath.
"Okay," she whispered, the word a fragile, hopeful thing in the dusty silence of the bookstore. "Okay."
They led her out, a new, trembling member of their misfit family.
As they passed Michael, Luna flinched, but she didn’t run.
She reached out a hesitant, trembling hand, her fingers brushing against his arm for a fraction of a second.
He felt a jolt, a static shock of pure psychic energy.
She ripped her hand back as if she’d been burned, her eyes wide with a new, specific, and deeply unsettling terror.
"It’s not just the dragon," she whispered, her voice a horrified, disbelieving thing.
She looked at him, her Seer’s eyes seeing something that no one else could.
"There are... so many others inside you."
She took a shaky, terrified breath, her final words a chilling, final verdict.
"And they are all so, so hungry."